Gerhard's Reviews > Theogony and Works and Days

I am researching the Golden Age of SF, so when Trump recently said his second term would be a new Golden Age for America, I thought, you can’t use the term like that. Rabbit-holing – a great research tool to find out everything about something that means nothing for your writing – led me to Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer from the 8th century BCE. Hesiod is best known for his didactic works ‘Theogony’ and ‘Works and Days’. The latter introduces the concept of the Golden Age, a utopian era of peace and prosperity and the first of five successive ages of humanity (it’s downhill from Golden to the Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages). ‘Theogony’ is a cosmological creation myth, starting from chaos and developing through a succession of divine rulers, with each generation of gods replacing the previous one. I doubt that Trump has read Hesiod, so he is in for a pretty big surprise.